Department of Back Issues | Magazine

Didier Lestrade is a bit flummoxed by all the attention he is getting lately for “stuff I did 20, 30 years ago.” Starting today, 12Mail — a new gallery in Paris — is presenting an exhibition about Magazine, the underground gay publication Lestrade founded in 1980.

Lestrade also has a book coming out, a collection of the House music reviews he wrote for the newspaper La Liberation from 1989 to 1999; and a journalist recently called him the most interesting French homosexual since the death of Yves Saint Laurent, probably due in part to Lestrade’s pioneering role as an AIDS activist.

On the phone from his home in Normandy, the 52-year-old — who also just started a personal Web site — says “so much is happening right now, and the amazing thing is that all this interest is coming from young, straight people.” While he is virtually unknown outside of France, one need only consider Lestrade’s earliest serious endeavor to know that the recognition he is getting is well-deserved.

In the wake of Butt magazine, which resuscitated the queer zine genre in 2001, so many arty, self-made publications have cropped up — from Madrid to Berlin — that they hardly qualify as alternative anymore. But in 1980, Magazine was nothing less than groundbreaking.

A 22-year-old high-school dropout from the south of France, Lestrade started Magazine with his boyfriend at the time as a quarterly “fanzine,” featuring long interviews a la Warhol paired with photographs of men by some of the best talent around, including established names like Pierre & Gilles, Walter Pfeiffer and others who were just starting out.

Everything about Magazine was new, from the stark photoless cover design with its bold typeface to the way the men were photographed. The pictures weren’t overtly sexual, but proudly confronted the viewer in a different way: “To us, showing a face was the most important thing because back in 1980, gay people still had to hide their faces,” Lestrade says.

That may explain why in the new exhibition, the most disarming images aren’t Tom of Finland’s naughty drawings, but simple frontal, head-portraits by Michel Amet, who like Lestrade, was a kid at the time and remains largely unknown.

Magazine also featured interviews with an inspired mix of avant-garde artists, synth-pop stars, fashion people, Beat poets and subcultural icons. It was as if Lestrade had invited all his dream guests to one fascinating dinner party. Paul Morrissey, Edmund White, David Hockney, Divine, Keith Haring and Zandra Rhodes obliged. So did the punk choreographer Michael Clark and the expatriate intellectual Paul Bowles, a man so chic Stefano Pilati cited him as an inspiration for his most recent men’s collection.

Americans were high on Lestrade’s wishlist: “Like all the French kids of the time, we were in love with America and all the famous people there, like John Waters and the people of the Factory,” he recalls. “We tried to capture the glamour of that world in Magazine.” Not surprisingly, his favorite interview subject was Sylvester, the disco legend from Los Angeles who died of AIDS in 1988. “He was a personal hero to me.”

In addition to layouts and images from Magazine, 12Mail is showing a recently unearthed trove of quick snapshots Lestrade took of stylish people he saw on the street. They depict Bodymap duds, pretty androgynous things with mohawks and a fleeting, carefree moment in cultural history centered on Sundays at Le Palace, the club where Paris’s most beautiful boys and their friends congregated every week for the fabled Tea Dance party.

Lestrade created Magazine for and about this world. But in 1987, after three exceptionally good issues that ran up to 190 pages, he decided to call it quits. “Producing a beautiful magazine was getting more and more expensive and took up all my time, and I had to start making a living,” he says. His own experience with Magazine makes him respect those who are continuing his legacy today.

Regarding Butt, Kaiserin and all the other publications that have come out in the Magazine mold, he says, “I think it’s wonderful, I think anything that is on paper and has to do with queer culture, anything that is the result of someone, somewhere having the dedication to put ideas and pictures on paper, is wonderful.”